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Comment by simonsarris | Hacker News Reader

Being wrong about a prediction, even being very wrong, is not the same as lying or defrauding.

By 2019 pretty much everyone knows that Musk is a person who makes extremely ambitious predictions, projections, timelines, etc, and tries to meet them. Almost anyone in that situation will have a low hit rate. There's no sin to pay for, this is how he chooses to work and structure his businesses. Investors tend to be very happy with the results. To them, making a large number of ambitious goals and meeting some of them is still very worthwhile.

If you want to invest in companies where they make no such predictions, and the CEOs are never wrong, you are welcome to buy GE and follow their CEO on twitter. He has never, ever made a wrong prediction: https://twitter.com/larryculpjr

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What about making a prediction while being, as you're saying it, 95% sure its bullshit?

Is that not lying? When does it become lying, when you're 100% sure you're not saying the truth?

I think he makes these predictions based on the absolute best case scenario he can think of. It's hard to prove he had fraudulent intent unless you had communication from him that showed he knew what he was saying was impossible.

It becomes lying when it can be proved to be false. Stating that your company currently provides 200 blood analysis when it does not is very easy to disprove given insider documentation. Saying that by next year you'll be able to support the 1000 most common blood analysis is not lying, it's a somewhat of a promise but of course projects go behind schedule all the time.

There's a difference between saying I weigh less than 90kg and I will weigh less than 90kg by next year.

Because she took things that she knew to be not true and said the they were true in order to get money.

She didn't say we hope to work with the US Army or that we plan to. She said that units were in use by them.

She didn't say the devices are on the verge of being used to analyze blood samples. She said that they were indeed being used to analyze a high percentage of the samples.

Many, many other examples.

That's the plain definition of fraud.

When the speaker implies uncertainty it is difficult for the investor to claim fraud because uncertainty was expressed to them. That the speaker "knows" the 95% figure is BS is very difficult to prove and generally everyone treats it as BS/puffing anyways.

If you could easily show that the CEO saying hitting the next milestone is 95% in the bag but in fact it is impossible AND they said so to others in private then that would also be prosecutable fraud.

Seems very presumptuous to assume Musk knows that he won't hit his goals. Most people make goals to try to hit them. He probably was bent on achieving that, and hit a snag.

But its aimed at Musk so no matter what it's an astute point! /s

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